The Switch. Olivia Goldsmith
asked how he wanted it, would leer and insist her question was a double entendre. “How do I want it?” he’d repeat, nudging Bob, who’d squirm with embarrassment while the bored waitress stared out over the parking lot. Invariably, after the girl left, Phil would begin his excited whisper. “You heard her. It’s not like I started it. How do I want it? Why doesn’t she just give me the key to her place? I tell you, they can’t leave me alone.”
The woman was looking at the sticker price of a sedan. She was squinting in the sun. Phil looked over at her. “Did you see that?” he asked Bob.
“What?”
“The way she stared at me, checking out my package,” Phil cried hoarsely. Sam Granger snorted. Bob rolled his eyes. Phil was a danger. to himself and others, Rosalie the Horrific might have been a witch, but she’d certainly had her hands full with Phil.
“Phil, behave,” Bob warned. “Take it easy or I’ll tell your father on you.”
“Hey! She better take it easy. The laws against sexual harassment cut both ways, ya know.”
“Control yourself, Phil. Try to sell a car.” Bob’s cellular rang and he pulled it out. He moved away from Sam Granger and put the phone to his ear. “Hello. Bob Schiffer. Oh,” he said. He lowered his voice. “Hi, Cookie Face. I can’t talk now. No. Really. I can’t.” Bob looked around. Phil was leaning up against the sedan, talking to the poor female prospect while Sam had disappeared into the front seat of a model a row away. “Come on, honey. You know this isn’t a good place for me to talk,” Bob murmured into the phone. He laughed out loud. “Sing? If I can’t talk, how can I sing?” She always made him laugh, but after four months he still wasn’t sure if it was intentional or accidental. That was part of her charm. Now he listened to her request. “But you called me. The song makes no sense if I sing. No. Of course I do. All right, but then I have to go.” Bob began to hum into the phone, then tried for a Stevie Wonder voice. “I just called to say I love you … I just called to—”
When he was tapped on the shoulder, Bob must have jumped eight inches straight off the ground40. John Spencer, Bob and Sylvie’s best friend, was standing behind him. “Gotta go …,” Bob hissed into the phone. “No. Not now. And be sure to get the crane there by one o’clock,” he added in his normal authoritative tone, then flipped the phone closed and slipped it into his pocket. He turned to John as casually as he could and gave him a big bear hug. “Hey. How ya doing?”
John wasn’t buying it. “Why, you sneaky, slimy bastard. Bob the Saint …”
Bob opened his eyes wide and tried to make a blank face. He wasn’t sure it was working and when John raised his brows upward Bob felt his stomach tug downward. “What? It was Sylvie,” he protested.
John shook his head. “Maybe I’m just a general practitioner, but
I’m not stupid. You, Bob? Come on. You’re no player. What the hell is going on?”
“Nothing,” Bob said and sounded to himself like one of the twins when they were eight years old. He looked at John’s doubting face. “Okay,” he admitted. “Something. But nothing important.” He bit his lip. “I don’t want to hurt Sylvie. You don’t either, do you?”
John looked him in the eyes. “I won’t tell, if that’s what you’re asking, but I won’t lie. She’s my friend too. She was my girlfriend before she even met You.”
“I know. I know. You remind me of that all the time. But this is … just a temporary thing.”
“So? Temporary but indefensible.”
Bob, trapped, knew he had no defense. “Well, Phil did it,” he said, sounding like one of the twins when they were ten.
“Great response,” John snorted. “Let’s not forget that Phil is a delusional penis with a man attached. And he wasn’t married to a Sylvie.”
Bob looked away, ashamed. John’s wife, Nora, had died almost three years ago, and if their marriage hadn’t been perfect then, it was now, enshrined in John’s memory. Since then John had thrown himself into his practice and into his avocation—Little League coach and professional widower—but in Bob’s opinion, he took a certain amount of pleasure in wallowing in his bereavement. Plus, there were always so many Shaker Heights women dropping off casseroles and inviting him to be the extra man at their dinner parties that his life wasn’t anything close to the living hell he depicted it as.
But mine could be, Bob thought. It could if I lost Sylvie. And he had been meaning to end it with the girl. He just didn’t know how. He had never had an affair before. Best to come clean. “You’re right. You caught me,” he admitted. “I don’t know what I’m doing. One day I’m a nice guy, the next I’m a Kennedy husband.” He paused. John looked skeptical, as if he doubted Bob’s sincerity. “Wait. I’m worse. I’m dead dog meat.” John raised his brows. “No,” he corrected himself. “I’m dead dog meat with maggots.” John nodded. “Can we talk about this while you drive me to my house?” Bob asked. “I don’t deserve to sit behind the wheel of Beautiful Baby.”
“Vehicular morality wasn’t the first concern I had.”
“Please. Will you drive me?”
“No problem. I can’t get enough of that dead dog meat smell in my car.”
They got into John’s three-year-old sedan, which Bob had sold him after using it as a showroom model. He’d given John a real deal on it. They drove off the lot. It was time for Bob to recoup a little. After all, John was only a doctor, not a judge.
“Don’t tell me you never did it. With all those women patients! With all those females who worship you. Swear on Nora’s memory that you didn’t.”
“Not with a patient. Never.” John maneuvered the car into the passing lane.
“Ah, With someone impatient! Come on. Come clean. You were human too!”
John hesitated. “Only once,” he admitted.
“I knew it! See. No one is perfect.”
“Okay. Okay. But I was loaded. No excuse. I was on a business trip and it was with a pharmacologist, not with a patient. I regretted it immediately.”
“Afterward, that’s easy. I always regret it afterward too.”
“Yeah, but it was a decade ago. To this day I regret it. Nora’s dead almost four years and I still feel really bad about it.” Bob patted John on the shoulder. John came out of his reverie. “Just look at your brother-in-law.”
“God. Do I have to?”
“I mean, look how he ruined his life. His ex-wife hates him, his children are turned against him. And he can’t afford a meat loaf sandwich.”
“But he had an excuse: he was married to Rosalie.”
“What does that mean?”
Bob gave John a look. “Rosalie pushed him into infidelity. Me, I just slipped. I never meant for this to happen,” Bob admitted. “This girl was just there, all pink and naked.”
“She was pink and naked right when you met her?”
“Well, no. But, I could tell she wanted to be…. Hey. Come on. You think I want to lie to my wife?”
John’s voice finally became sympathetic. “No, buddy, I don’t.”
“In its way, my position is its own kind of hell,” Bob said mournfully.
John nodded. “I’ve been there.” Then, for a moment, John became distracted by a racing green 530i that passed them on the right. “Nice model,” he commented.
“Forget it,” Bob told him dismissively. “It’s not for you. A vinyl interior. If you’re going to trade up, trade up for the best.” John nodded his agreement. He pulled back into the right